Sometimes, Diving into Your Past Can Be Constructive.

I wrote yesterday about keeping old ideas in a notebook. Well, it’s also useful to take some time out occasionally and page through those old notebooks. It is often interesting seeing how much you have grown over time as your skills and knowledge has expanded. It’s also often useful to see how you solved problems in the past and to possibly use some of those ideas in the future.

The past version of you was far less knowledgeable, but sometimes that lack of knowledge leads you to solutions that seem less obvious once you understand things. It is sometimes those very solutions that are the most interesting and elegant.

Basically, you need to remind yourself that sometimes looking at the world with your earlier naivety will sometimes offer you the perfect solutions. Let yourself view things as you once did and then use your current knowledge and experience to make it work even better.

Don’t Throw Away Things That Are Still Useful

This has to do with my personal life as much as it does programming. While writing a program we often go through many iterations of what we are creating or how to solve individual issues. While, many of these ideas won’t be used in the final program, it is still worth keeping some record of them.

A couple of ways to do this are to use a notebook to work through your ideas. As you change your ideas or come up with new ideas, simply turn the page and start again. This will allow you to keep your old ideas (ideally with dates written by them), while you explore new ideas or solutions. When the notebook is full simply put it on the shelf and start another. Notebooks don’t take up much space and the are relatively cheap to purchase.

I couldn’t begin to list the times that I have run across old notes and they inspired a solution to a new problem that I was having. The same can be true for you. It just takes a bit of a change in how you do things.

Project Pricing – A Popular App of Mine to Price Projects.

One of my most popular apps right now is Project Pricing. This is an app that I wrote because I needed an easier way to figure out how to price items that I was selling on Etsy. This was my solution.

The app solves some common issues that people have when they price their own items – such as including enough to pay themselves. The simple layout lists several fields that allow the user to enter their own numbers. It also allows you to decide if you want to calculate how long it took to make the item in minutes, or hours.

It then allows you to play with the margins you want to make and lets you quickly see how that affects the overall price of the item. Since I personally use Etsy to sell items, it included an option to include Etsy fees in the cost.

This app is as educational to explaining pricing downfalls as it is useful to those that understand how to price their items.